Ubuntu is great, if you are ok with the command line, and aren't afraid of having one simple update completely screw up your installation, to the point where a reinstall will just be easier than resolving various broken dependencies... (distribution upgrades are a pain - they sometimes work fine, but other times, break everything that can be broken).

? Jeez, that's really odd. The devs are pretty careful. But I suppose it depends on what you update. If you manage to only update some libraries, and not the apps themselves, then yeah, that would happen (but why would you update only libraries?) That's kind of like putting new DLLs in Windows instead of installing upgraded versions of your apps.

I learned the hard way that you cannot *just* update gcc using synaptic. If you try, you will end up updating your whole distribution, even if you've already got the latest packages. I'm guessing that I only found the main breaking point in Ubuntu. Otherwise, I still use Ubuntu for the server @ work (and had a horrible problem yesterday where the /etc folder grew to 14 Octabytes in size, and became unreadable).

As of 2006, Google uses 2 petabytes of disk space

15 petabytes of data will be generated each year in particle physics experiments using CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, due to be launched in 2007.

In October 2004, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) installed over 1.1 petabytes of high performance DataDirect Networks storage on BlueGene/L.

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine contains almost 2 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. (as of May 2006)

The first commercially-available Petabyte Storage Array was launched by the EMC Corporation in January 2006, with an approximate cost of USD 4 million.

NOB Cross media facilities in the Netherlands employs a 1.5-petabyte storage network for the storage of all old and new public television and radio content in digital format. Within the next year, most Dutch public television content will be pulled directly out of this database during broadcast.

RapidShare in 2006 had 1.08 petabyte of hard-disk storage.

As for the other thing, if you updated gcc to another major version, it sounds pretty normal. Annoying but normal: when you want to update an element of a toolchain, you have to rebuild the whole toolchain.

@tommyp, a friend of mine told me about songbird and IIRC it is built the same way as firefox. I'm thinking it will probably be heavy and slow. How is it in real usage?